'Set up in 1987 by Friends of the Earth, the Earthworm Book Award is the first "green" children's book prize of its kind. The award promotes and rewards environmental awareness and sensitivity in literature (fiction and non-fiction) for children of all ages. The group highlights the many threats to our natural world, celebrating its richness, variety, and beauty. 'three members —a librarian, a connoisseur of children's writing, and a person concerned with the Book Trust —make up the selection committee. Each judge reads twelve books, from which they select two which are then read by every single member of the jury. They narrow the 300-400 books submitted down to an over-all winner and runners-up. '
'A boy and his father travel in their boat, ‘Time Machine’ to a stretch of beach beside a primordial tropical rainforest. As the boy walks among the trees he imagines the forest as it might have been in the past. Dinosaurs emerge, barely perceptible, from a tangle of trunks and vines; the faint outlines of an aboriginal child melt into a background of trees and in the final haunting scene the unspoiled vista readers have toured is overlaid with translucent images of a possible future civilisation..' (Source: Author's website)